Sausages have been traditionally made by filling the natural intestines of sheep or other animals, with a sausage product whereupon the filled natural casing was formed into links for cooking. In more modern times, sausages are predominantly made by introducing an emulsion into an artificial casing, which encases the sausage material through linking and preliminary cooking. Machines for making sausages with artificial casings have a high volume capability (up to 30,000 sausages per hour). Efforts have been made to use these high-speed machines with natural casings. However, because of the nature of the natural casings including their relatively shorter and variable length and non-uniform diameter, modern sausage encasing machines have not achieved the volume and capacity with natural casings as they do with artificial casings.
It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide a method and a machine for encasing sausages whereby the position of the casing on the stuffing tube is monitored by a sensor.
A further object of this invention is to provide a method and a machine for encasing sausage which employs a sensor on the stuffing tube to detect the end of the natural casings.
A further object of this invention is to provide a method and machine for encasing sausage which employs a sensor which can detect the diameter difference between the casings in the shirred state and in its non-shirred condition.
A still further object of this invention is to use a plurality of different types of sensors to determine the position and condition of the natural casing.
These and other objects will be apparent to those skilled in the art.
A method of stuffing natural casings with emulsion involves slidably mounting a collar element on the stuffing tube of the machine adjacent an end of the stuffing tube opposite to the discharge end thereof. The collar is slidably advanced towards the discharge end of the tube to telescope the casing into a shirred condition while leaving a non-shirred portion downstream thereof. The non-shirred portion of the casing is progressively advanced while the casing is filled with emulsion from the tube. A sensor is placed in the proximity of the non-shirred portion of the casing to detect whether shirred or non-shirred casing is present. The sensor is connected to a controller so that the collar will be advanced to slide the casing material on the tube when the non-shirred casing is detected, and the advance of the collar is stopped when shirred casing material is detected.
A machine includes the foregoing components to accomplish the method.